I came here looking for a shoulder to cry on, and find out what other people who think the same way said.
I was a career progammer but gradually found myself geting less and less interested in it. I once found it extremely rewarding, but now it’s just boring and painful.
I’ve tried to remedy it by spending hours online looking through hundreds of pages of fashionable and old programming languages, editors and APIs, trying to find something I care about. I’ll noodle around with it, get bored and read a book.
It annoys me because I still have ideas for software products but I haven’t found a way to make the process of making them stimulating enough to go ahead. Same today, dragged myself to my PC and looked around for something interesting, failed, and then Googled for “I hate programming”.
If I’m honest, I think it’s associated with mental energy. To continue with programming you must be able to absorb the minutiae of new languages quickly and reliably. You can’t just get a nice overview and get to work. You need to be consumed by details. Progarmming is a precision task with thousands of little facts you must have straight. It’s the mental equivalent to obsessively collecting grains of sand, analysing the minutiae of every single one of them.
I don’t even like programmeres. I don’t like university computer-science lecturers.
As a teenager, it’s easy. As an adult, it’s hard, and it’s hard to care. I don’t even admire programmers anymore, I look at papers today and think “That’s clever, but who cares?”.
I don’t admire what programmers do for a living anymore. I think about what it’s like to write software for a living and it was only fun before I became aware of the world outside it. It’s actually quite a miserable profession and I can’t think of any programmers right now I’d want to trade places with. Not even the ones who are famous for work I admire for its technical ingenuity.
I also think it’s the dividend. Practices like music and writing are easier to accomplish and more rewarding.
Take musical composition, you can get started just understanding keys, chords and changes, and with that you can write credible music in minutes and the outcome is more interesting for others who can actually appreciate what you’ve been doing with your time. Essentially, there are other tasks which are both easier and more rewarding, and more appreciable to other people.
Prorgramming is spending hours perfecting technical achievements that nobody except a small number of other cave dwelling geeks appreciate.
What’s the point? I’d rather go outside, go to a bar and grab a sandwich.
I don’t even envy my wealthy friends in software or hardware anymore. They are succesful on paper, but their jobs deny them most of the joys of living.